Here’s another story from the TMI Files, and it’s quite possibly the most. . .um. . .risque of the bunch of stories. If that’s not something you feel comfortable reading, or if you’re at work, I encourage you to skip over the next few paragraphs and start reading again at the fifteenth paragraph, which is a good bit and takes place on Halloween.

Like I’ve said in the last couple of these stories, there’s a certain age during which young kids are curious about nudity and romantic feelings, but it only lasts for a certain amount of time before puberty happens and changes everything. The last of these of ‘innocent’ experiences for me was when I was ten years old, and it naturally involved GirlUpTheStreet, who will henceforth be known as WonderWoman.

At the end of our street in Yakima was (and still is) a fairly good-sized Catholic school and church. Next to that is a fairly good-sized lawn and baseball field, and next to THAT is a fairly good-sized football stadium, with fairly good-sized bleachers. All of us kids spent countless hours around the school, though none of us went there. They had a large log toy on the playground, and the school’s sidewalks were paved with smooth and slippery cement, which made for some excellent bike riding and skidding around all of the corners. Another of our favorite endeavors was to sneak underneath the chain-link fence and into the stadium, day or night. Sometimes we would play football, sometimes we’d play hide-and-seek, sometimes we’d just roam around. This isn’t the interesting part of the story yet, and it’s also not the location of my final innocent tryst with WonderWoman.

I told you about the school and the stadium because A) it’s such a huge part of the setting for our neighborhood stories, and B) there was a network of fruit warehouses to the south and to the east of the stadium. The one to the south (which has since been divided up and developed into Glenwood Square) is where my brother and dad and I witnessed a Volkswagen Bug stall on the train tracks and nearly get crushed, but the one to the east is the one in which FinalInnocentTryst occurred.

During the day, the warehouse was a hive of activity, and none of us was brave enough to speak to any of the ragged, scruffy men who worked there. After hours, the place was full of great places for kids to play. There were countless fences to climb under, and boxes of fruit to throw at each other, and large wooden pallot boxes to hide in. The boxes became our favorite places, because not only could we hide, we could also see through the cracks of the boxes to see if anyone was coming.

Late one afternoon, WonderWoman and I decided we wanted to go to the warehouse and check it out, since it was a weekend and there was nothing going on over there. We climbed under the fence and walked through the warehouse. We’d been there many times with the whole group of kids, and each of us had gone separately a million times, but this was our first time going there together. We’d been holding hands palm-to-palm the way ten-year-old kids do, without the fingers interlaced. Suddenly we heard a noise and a door opened at the far end of the warehouse, letting a sliver of daylight into the dark warehouse. This can’t be happening, we thought. There’s never anyone around on weekends.

Two men came through the door, and our hearts leapt into our throats. We ran toward the door at our end of the warehouse, pushed the door out and sprinted toward freedom. The men heard our footfalls and yelled, “Hey, you kids get outta here!” They turned and started to chase us out.

The gate was too far away, and we knew we’d never be able to squirm under it before the men caught us, so we ran to one of the pallot boxes and jumped inside. Breathing heavily from our sprint, we peered through the cracks in the box and saw the men come out the door and half-heartedly search for us. They were about thirty feet from us, and they had no idea we were there. We didn’t want our loud breathing to give away our hiding place, so we kissed. A lot. Even after the men went away. We decided that we quite enjoyed being trapped in there.

“Here, let’s do something else,” she said in her let’s-pretend-we’re-married voice. She slid her pants down to her knees and motioned for me to do the same. Having done that, we sat down next to each other, close enough that our posteriors were touching, and kissed some more. This was a whole new level for both of us, since we hadn’t ever really kissed before, and certainly not like that. She rose up to her knees and said, “Let’s touch.”

“Okay,” I said, and rose up to my knees in front of her. We were kneeling a baby’s arm-length from each other with our pants down. We kissed again, quickly, just once, and she reached out to touch the tip of my penis with her first two fingers. She kept them there, ever so gently, and was fascinated to watch tumescence in action. She moved her index finger from the tip to the base, and back to the tip. Now it was my turn. There was a line on the skin of her lower abdomen from the elastic at the top of her underwear. I touched that line, and slid my finger slowly down. I didn’t put it inside her, because that wasn’t something that we would have done at that time. I just touched her gently from top to bottom to top, in the same way that she had done to me.

By this time, it was starting to get dark outside, and we thought we should get back home. We gave each other one last long kiss and, still kneeling, embraced and pulled our bodies together. Neither of us had experienced anything that magical before, and we held each other there for a very long moment. Afterwards, we stood, pulled our pants back up and found our way to a new place where the gate was unlocked, so we just walked right through and out to the street toward home.

We had our pants pulled up, but unzipped slightly, so that they’d stay up, but we still had the feeling of intimacy that it created. We were holding hands in that non-interlocked way again, until she found a discarded piece of garden hose in someone’s yard, picked it up, and started blowing into it like a trumpet. Suddenly we we saw a couple of the neighborhood kids at the end of our street. They saw us, too, and started running in our direction. I quickly zipped my pants up. “Your pants,” I said, “Get your pants!” She laughed, dropped the hose and reached for the zipper on her pants. She had a bit of difficulty, but got them zipped just as the kids arrived.

“What’re you guys doing?” they asked.

“Nothing,” we said, giving each other Significant Looks. All of us walked home together, and I don’t think any of the other kids was the wiser.

WonderWoman moved from my neighborhood not long after that, and she went to a different school, so I didn’t see her again until Halloween of the following year, by which time I was eleven and she was ten. She and her older brother came by our neighborhood to trick-or-treat and say hi to everybody. They arrived a bit late, maybe ten o’clock at night, and my brother and I were already practically asleep in our bunk beds. My mom let them in and got us up to say hello, cause she knew we’d be disappointed if we missed them.

My brother got up first and went in to say hi. I straightened up my Oakland Raiders pajamas and walked out a minute later. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and good-to-see-yous, but after a while it got a bit awkward. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just because we all hadn’t seen each other for such a long time, or maybe it was so late at night that we were all a little groggy, but we gave them some candy and said thanks-for-coming-by-and-stuff, and they went on their way again.

I turned back to walk into the bedroom, and that’s when I noticed that the fly on my pajamas was open, and that the tip of my little penis was poking out, and it had been out the entire time. It was as if it, too, was saying hello to the girl it missed. I smiled to myself, tucked it back into my fly, and crawled into bed.

That’s the last time I saw her.

Sometimes, I wonder what became of her. I’m sure she’s old and fat and married with kids now, like so many other people our age are, but I’ll never forget her as she was back then, and I’ll never forget some of the moments we shared. They’re still imprinted in my brain, and that stuff happened over three decades ago.

Love, it would seem, conquers all; even such seemingly insurmountable forces as time and an otherwise rapidly fading memory.